Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 26

Garden Tour, June 8

My garden, along with several others, will be on the Garden Club of Lincoln's annual tour. It's free and runs from 9am to 1pm on Saturday, June 8.



I'll have prairie seedlings and seed packets for sale, my books, and maybe more goodies. Below is a listing of all the gardens, roughly along A Street all the way across Lincoln.









Community Orchard Project

Christ United Methodist Church
(CUMC),4530 A. St., Lincoln, NE




Directions: Located between S. 40th and S. 48th, the
orchard is on t...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>

Garden Pics & Video Tour

My 1,500' native plant garden is remarkable. Each year plants die, others thrive, still others move to places nearby from where I put them as if saying hey, you were so close, but this is what I prefer. Plants evolve and morph before my eyes, and in the rush of May and June growth it's all a gardener can do to keep up. When July comes with all of its prairie blooms, the relatively peaceful onslaught of thousands of insects is a welcome breath of air as many plants complete their annual cycles...

Why Corn is Evil Reason #629

"Since the
center pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated
cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere
250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water
— hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much
of the aquifer on a relentless decline.... A shift to growing corn, a
much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by
demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the
price of...

Prairie This, Lincoln

Join me at my new venture, a website devoted to images of Lincoln, Nebraska urban and suburban spaces that could be prairie. Send in your photos! To find out how, link on the image. Let's be Prairie City, USA, and cut grounds maintenance costs, increase property value, diversify our natural resources, clean the water and air, and enrich the lives of families, the disabled, and the under privileged.

Hot Hot Hot in the May Garden

Finally done grading my for English classes at two colleges (oh the part time adjunct life), slowly settling into blogging again and a summer of finishing my Oklahoma memoir. On June 1 I'll be presenting part of the research from that memoir as the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference, alongside one of my favorite writers, Linda Hogan. So if you want to hear about Mennonite migration in the late 1800s in the southern Plains, I can hook you up.



I've had several m...

Can't Have Enough Native Plants

I'm not sure how many of you here also read my articles at Houzz and Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. Last week I posted the below piece at the latter site and was surprised at the reception I got -- even my wife said it begs for a bigger article. How do you feel about what I say?





I’ll just come out and say something to alienate lots of folks: I
believe our landscapes should be planted with mostly native trees,
shrubs, flowers, sedges, and grasses. And by mostly I mean 80%, 90%,
100%. I...

Silphium -- by Aldo Leopold

This is such a powerful little conservation story Leopold tells -- I just love the simultaneous sadness and joy it evokes (as any piece of good writing should do). How do you feel about it? I think I'll schedule this post to go live at the same moment I'll be listening to Wes Jackson of The Land Institute speak.





Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving
to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of
this graveyard li...

Earth Day Blues, Or Greens

It's Earth Day, a recognition that I feel has become as regimented, stilted, and looked over as Flag Day or Professional Assistant II Day (formally Secretary's Day). I'm by nature an introverted, melancholic, misanthropic guy; I contribute to the degradation of this planet. I'm sucking energy from coal-fired power plants right now, a resource ripped from the earth like a kidney from an abducted person for the black market organ trade. My natural gas heat just kicked in. I'll drive five miles...

Touch My Beard at Two Big Events

I hope you'll come talk to me at two local events this next week. My native prairie plant garden coaching business, Monarch Gardens, will have a table at:



Lincoln Earth Day, party at Antelope Park -- 4/21, Noon to 5pm, free. 75+ exhibits and plenty of food trucks.



Spring Affair plant sale, Lancaster Events Center -- 4/27, 9am to 4pm, free. The largest plant sale in the Midwest (get there early and wear padding or body armor!). Lots of vendors selling even more garden stuff.



I'll have seed...

LEGO My Garden

Last Saturday I read from my new poetry collection at the Nebraska Book Festival in Omaha, and before the reading my wife and I swung by Lauritzen Gardens for the Nature Connects exhibit. Being a Saturday, the place was swarming with kids admiring the LEGO creations. Some day, I'll have a LEGO room again.





I suspect that if stung by a bee this size one would explode.







Perfect.







Not at all perfect. Grrrrr.










A dusting of snow also left this on the last of the iris out bac...